Free Republic

With Lois Lerner facing a contempt of Congress vote Wednesday, and coming up on the one-year anniversary of the IRS conservative-targeting scandal (this Saturday all cocktails consumed in America will be a tax write-off, The Daily Caller has decided), it’s time to take a look at the pro-IRS case. What have we found? There isn’t one. Every defense put forth by the Obama administration and its allies in the Democratic Party and the media has now been disproved and discredited. No, we’re not talking about Jay Carney’s “fake scandal” line or Obama’s “not even a smidgen of corruption” talking points....

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog Summary of Obama’s IRS scandal, as of November 22, 2014 In May 2013, the Washington Post reported that the IRS had illegally targeted conservative groups for additional reviews. Organizations with the words “tea party” or “patriot” were singled out for harassment, such as requiring them to provide a list of donors, details about their internet postings on social networking websites, and information about their family members.When this was first reported by the media in May 2013, Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS division that had conducted these illegal activities, claimed that only low level employees had...

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog Summary of Obama’s IRS scandal In May 2013, the Washington Post reported that the IRS had illegally targeted conservative groups for additional reviews. Organizations with the words “tea party” or “patriot” were singled out for harassment, such as requiring them to provide a list of donors, details about their internet postings on social networking websites, and information about their family members.When this was first reported by the media in May 2013, Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS division that had conducted these illegal activities, claimed that only low level employees had known about it, and that...

An Internal Revenue Service manager who described himself as a "conservative Republican" told congressional investigators that no one in the agency's Cincinnati office was trying to target tea party organizations for political reasons, according to an interview transcript released Tuesday. The manager, John Shafer, said he and an employee in his screening unit decided to pull applications for tax-exempt status filed by political groups and send them to managers in Washington. He said they were aware of the controversy over the groups and wanted to ensure they were treated uniformly. "Because of media attention that he had seen, he had...

There is a gal in DC named Holly Paz. she is also in the food chain according to a Cinc TV station http://www.fox19.com/story/22401447/rc-inspector-general-may-need-to-interview-irs-agents-again You can go to the FEC web site and see that she has been a bid donor to Obummer in 2008 about $4,000.00 Also here is a story from the Cincinnati Newspaper. http://news.cincinnati.com/interactive/article/20130522/NEWS01/305230035/IRS-emails-Who-knew-what-when- Another one from national Review.

On March 31, 2010, the day before the Inspector General's report says the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) began its scheme to target tea party and conservative groups, the White House Visitors Log reveals that President Barack Obama met with IRS union boss Colleen Kelley. In a notable feat of investigative journalism, American Spectator reporter Jeffrey Lord exposed what appears to be an unholy alliance among the White House, Democrat members of Congress and the thousands of IRS employees, who are members of the far-left, anti-Tea Party National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU). The NTEU, which supported Obama in 2008 and 2012,...

A series of letters suggests that senior IRS official Lois Lerner was directly involved in the agency’s targeting of conservative groups as recently as April 2012, more than nine months after she first learned of the activity. Lerner, the director of the IRS exempt organizations office in Washington, D.C., signed cover letters to 15 conservative organizations currently represented by the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) between in March and April of 2012. The letters, such as this one sent to the Ohio Liberty Council on March 16, 2012, informed the groups applying for tax-exempt status that the IRS...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The IRS says it has lost emails from five more workers who are part of congressional investigations into the treatment of conservative groups that applied for tax exempt status.

The short answer? The highest-ranking official in the Cincinnati office where, the IRS would have us believe, a few rogue employees initiated a scheme to target conservatives. SNIP When an application for tax exempt status comes into the IRS, agents have 270 days to work through that application. If the application is not processed within those 270 days it automatically triggers flags in the system. When that happens, individual agents are required to input a status update on that individual case once a month, every month until the case is resolved. Keep in mind, at least 300 groups were targeted...

"Congressional investigators are fuming over revelations that the Internal Revenue Service has lost a trove of emails to and from a central figure in the agency's tea party controversy." That's the opening sentence of the Associated Press story on the IRS's claim that it lost an unknown number of emails over two years relating to the agency's alleged targeting of political groups hostile to the president. But note how the AP casts the story: The investigators -- Republican lawmakers -- are outraged. Is it really so hard to imagine that if this were a Republican administration, the story wouldn't be...

Ahead of new hearings on the IRS abuse scandal, the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee has released transcripts of depositions it has taken with IRS employees. The employees directly contradict IRS honcho Lois Lerner’s claim that the targeting was merely the work of “rogue” employees in the IRS Cincinnati office. Q: So is it your perspective that ultimately the responsible parties for the decisions that were reported by the IG are not in the Cincinnati office? A: I don’t know how to answer that question. I mean, from an agent standpoint, we didn’t do anything wrong. We followed...

Documents also Reveal Unusual Pressure from Key Democrat Senator to Target Conservatives (Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today released a new batch of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) documents revealing that its handling of Tea Party applications was directed out of the agency’s headquarters in Washington, DC. The documents also show extensive pressure on the IRS by Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) to shut down conservative-leaning tax-exempt organizations. The IRS’ emails by Lois Lerner detail her misleading explanations to investigators about the targeting of Tea Party organizations. The documents came in response to an October 2013 Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act...

In his first Congressional appearance since news of the lost Lois Lerner emails, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen was alternately attacked by Republicans and praised by Democrats who apologized to him for his treatment and called the investigation an “endless conspiracy theory” by Republicans. Under oath before the House Ways and Means Committee, Koskinen restated what Congress had been told privately: that emails of Lerner and six other relevant IRS officials have been irretrievably lost because of crashes of their hard drives and servers. Koskinen defended not telling Congress in numerous previous appearances about the email losses. In those appearances, he...

. June 18, 2014 Newt Gingrich We are watching the most significant crisis of constitutional order since Watergate, the last time an administration broke the law deliberately and repeatedly. And none of the current cases look more Nixonian than what has been happening at the IRS. Thirteen months ago, President Obama stood before the American people, acknowledged that the IRS had “improperly screened conservative groups,” and promised to get to the bottom of the matter and to “hold the responsible parties accountable.” “It’s inexcusable,” he said, “and Americans are right to be angry about it, and I am angry about...

Mitch McConnell delivered a speech today at the American Enterprise Institute to officially signal that the IRS scandal has entered its post-fact phase. When the IRS first revealed that its Cincinnati office had attempted to enforce its nonprofit laws using a search function that disproportionately impacted conservatives, Republicans were certain it must have come from the White House. They were going to follow the facts. But all of the facts point in the same direction, which is that the Obama administration had nothing to do with it at all. That was the conclusion of the agency’s inspector-general report, as well...

During the month of January 2014, IREHR will publish a multi-segment special report on the current status of the Tea Party movement. We will publish a track the membership of the principal organizations in the movement—a task undertaken by no organization or agency other than IREHR. We will look at geographic regions where this membership is concentrated. And we will look at some of the money that keeps this movement in the public eye. In the piece below, we follow the Tea Parties over the course of 2013. It was a year of countervailing winds and storms. A drive against...

Two senior White House aides knew weeks ago that a probe of the Internal Revenue Service had found that the U.S. tax agency had inappropriately targeted conservative groups, but did not tell President Barack Obama, a White House spokesman said on Monday. A Treasury Department official informed White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler on April 24 about the preliminary findings of a report that would fuel the latest in a series of scandals to confront Obama at the start of his second term. The report was issued by a Treasury inspector general on May 14, four days after an IRS official...

President Obama and his administration would like us to believe that the scandal(s) surrounding the IRS are nothing more than a fabricated witch hunt designed to cause trouble for an administration distrusted by conservatives and Fox News. He said there wasn't a "smidgen of corruption" present in the IRS' targeting of conservative groups. Yes, that's what he really said to Bill O'Reilly. He as much as blamed the scandal on the reporting done by Fox News. He claims the investigation into the matter found the IRS and the agents involved did nothing wrong in their targeting of 501(c)(4) groups. What...

Obama-appointed IRS Chief Counsel is sued. IRS targeted Christine O’Donnell. So. Buckle in. True the Vote, the Tea Party-style group targeted by Internal Revenue Service officials who are now at the very heart of the IRS scandal, is suing William Wilkins. That would be the William Wilkins who is the IRS Chief Counsel. True the Vote, “the nation’s leading voters’ rights and election integrity organization,” is announcing today that it is adding Wilkins — one of only two Obama political appointees to the IRS — to its federal lawsuit against the IRS. The group is also adding five other ranking...

The other day I wrote that as investigators got closer and closer to the truth about Benghazi democrats would max out the volume on the shriek meter. It's begun. The are five stages to a scandal. They are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. We have already passed Stage 1: DenialHouse Democrats Dismiss Existence Of Obama Scandals Rep. Gerry Connolly refuses to use the word “scandal.” After two weeks of brutal news cycles — with frenzied Republicans and a hyped up press corps aggressively covering every inch of three controversies surrounding the Obama administration — Connolly insists this too, shall...